


a conversation.

by letmebefranwithyou



Series: come in, take off your shoes; make yourself at home. [2]
Category: The Host - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: F/F, Gen, oh jared you mess of a bastard of a man
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-23
Updated: 2020-07-23
Packaged: 2021-03-05 07:08:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25466782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/letmebefranwithyou/pseuds/letmebefranwithyou
Summary: 'round and 'round they go.
Relationships: Ian O'Shea & Melanie Stryder, Ian O'Shea/Wanderer, Melanie Stryder/Wanderer
Series: come in, take off your shoes; make yourself at home. [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1844680
Comments: 17
Kudos: 49





	a conversation.

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Steven Universe's song "Stronger Than You".  
> The poem quoted in the begining and in the chapter title is Andrew Marvell's "A Dialogue Between The Soul And The Body".  
> This is a tiny one, but it's been written for a while, so I thought I'd post it already. I hope you guys like it :)

_ SOUL _

_O who shall, from this dungeon, raise_

_A soul enslav’d so many ways?_

_(...)_

_[it is] hung up, as ’twere, in chains_

_Of nerves, and arteries, and veins;_

_Tortur’d, besides each other part,_

_In a vain head, and double heart._

_Andrew Marvell, "A Conversation Between The Soul And The Body"_

The beginning would feel like the end. I’d been warned.

But it didn’t.

I knew the end. I had been there. It had been the pale grey of grief drowning everything else, a malformed plan that I wasn’t sure she wasn’t aware of, and a deep, deep fear. Later Doc would tell her that I woke up screaming, and I basically did.

I opened our hazel eyes to the rough rock wall of the hospital; our body was on its belly, our head turned to the side, and I saw blurred shapes moving haphazardly, and couldn’t ascribe meaning to any of it. I felt—tilted. Unanchored. It took me a while to realize I was hearing voices, and even more for my vision to focus.

I didn’t realize it, though.

That I started screaming.

Jared— _Jared,_ I thought, and my heart broke, and I didn’t even know why—was tall and broad and scary, and he had a knife in his hands. Doc was backed against a corner, sobbing and shaking like a leaf. His hands were cupped around something silver and bright. A part of me felt relieved (oh, he’s doing his best to keep his promise) and another felt enraged (how fucking _dare he_ try to keep that promise) while another felt terrified ( _Doc has Wanderer in his hands and Jared is in front of him with that knife and the promise—_ )

I bolted from the cot and swung my fist back. I didn’t have to think about it.

It collided with Jared’s solar plexus and sent him sprawling against the floor with a shout. His eyes were wide and he had my name on his lips, relieved and afraid, and I knew his shock was the only reason I had managed to knock him so soundly. I wasn’t going to look the gift horse in the mouth. I turned to Doc and wrenched Wanderer from his hands as quickly as I could.

He let me easily, giving her to me gratefully, his tears coming like a torrent down his face.

I backed away, panting like I’d just run a marathon, eyes wide and throat raw. They stared at me and didn’t move. I sprung to the side of the room where Doc kept the cryotanks and grabbed the first one I saw. _Just wait until she stops moving_ , we had said, and it meant I was on a time limit and I had _no idea if I was on time—_

But she was moving in our hands, the silver strands of her body soft like a caress.

“Hey,” Kyle’s voice came from one of the other cots, groggy and confused. “What’s going on?”

I shoved Wanderer into the cryotank and took off running out of that fucking place before our body could even _comprehend_ that Kyle was awake and _behind us_ , because I was panicking enough as it was already.

I didn’t even hear Jared shout my name.

I ran to Ian’s room, and then only stopped running because his shitty door demanded more cognition than I was capable of at the moment. I slammed against it, out of breath, and cried in frustration when I couldn’t open it. I started knocking, though _knocking_ was a polite word for it.

“ _Ian!_ ” I screamed. “ _Wake up, wake up! Let us in!_ ”

Ian wrenched the door open.

“What? Wanda? What on Earth—”

I shoved him in and followed him, closed the door behind us, and pressed our back against it for good measure.

Ian stood two paces away from us, wide-eyed and worried. He opened his mouth to ask… then caught sight of the cryotank I was clutching to my side.

“Oh,” he said, gutted.

I almost laughed. I slid down the door until I was sort of sitting, feet planted against the ground in case I needed to run, and tried to breathe.

“We’re fine,” I told him, squeezing our eyes shut. “We’re fine, we’re alright, she’s _fine._ ”

“She was leaving,” Ian whispered, kneeling down beside us. “But she’d said…”

“She was going to kill herself,” I hissed, holding the cryotank so tightly our knuckles were white with it.

Ian’s hand landed on the cryotank. He stared.

“What?”

“She asked Doc to bury her next to Walt and Wes,” I told him, smiling sharply at him. “She _lied._ ”

The words cut him deeper than if I had tried to use that knife of Jared’s. His face went red with rage, then crumpled with horror, and I didn’t even care when he crowded us against the door so he could wrap his arms around the cryotank too. A part of me loosened. It was fine, now Ian was here. It felt good to be crowded, even, like he was holding the pieces of me together. I wound an arm around him.

“You stopped her,” he whispered.

“I did,” I said, then started to cry. “Fuck,” I said, and had nothing to wipe the stupid tears with. I hid my face against his shoulder. “Fuck, I just—I don’t know if she knew, it’s so— _hard_ to know that sort of thing, when we were us—but I wasn’t going to lay there and just _let_ Doc—”

“What was he going to do?” Ian asked. He sounded furious, and it made me smile again. _Good._

“Nothing,” I said, swallowing nothing. “She can’t survive out of a cryotank for long, so he was just going to… wait. So I planned to just put her in a damn cryotank as quickly as I could once I woke up. It worked.” My voice broke on the last word. “She was still moving. She’s alive. She’s fine.”

“She’s fine,” Ian repeated, reassuring, and I was glad for it. Hearing it in his voice soothed me, like it was really true now that he was saying it too. “But if everything’s alright, why did you come running like that?”

Our body locked up when we remembered it, and almost as if in answer to his question, something heavy and violent collided against the door. We shook with it, with how glued we were to it.

“ _O’Shea!_ ” Jared raged; the heavy thing had been his fist. “Is she there? Is Melanie there? Wake up and answer me!”

Ian took one look at our face and seemed to decide that, Jeb’s rules be damned, he would commit murder tonight. I shot up on wobbly legs and got as far away from the door as I could. The cryotank was smooth and cold in my hands, and I was going to let Jared or Doc or anyone aside from Ian and Jamie close to it _never_.

“Howe, you _bastard_ ,” Ian screamed back. He had gotten up with me and now he planted both hands against the door. “What did you _do?_ ”

“It’s all a big misunderstanding,” Doc’s faint, feeble voice came muffled from the other side of the door.

Jared, however, correctly interpreted Ian’s rage to mean we really were inside the room, and immediately stopped trying to mow his way in.

“Mel,” he said, so relieved that it hurt to hear it. “ _Fuck._ Don’t do that to me again.”

“ _Go to hell_ ,” I hissed, crouching in the corner.

Jared paused. I knew my words hurt him. I was happy for it.

“I was there to _stop_ Doc,” he tried, banging against the door softly, as if he couldn’t help himself. “I was trying to get her back, I wasn’t trying to hurt her. I promised, remember? That I wouldn’t hurt her.”

“You promised you wouldn’t try to separate us,” I said, voice low enough I was half-afraid he couldn’t hear, but suddenly I really, really couldn’t speak louder than this. I sounded wrecked. I felt it, too, though I was trying hard not to. “You didn’t say anything about not hurting her. And Doc—tell Doc that if I see his stupid face again, I’m going to punch him in it.”

“You were _with her_ when she spoke to him, how can you blame him for any of this?” Jared said, frustrated.

I could blame him as much as I fucking wanted.

“Go away,” Ian shouted, punching the door as if he could punch Jared through it. “They don’t want you here!”

“Is Wanda speaking with you through the cryotank?” Jared asked Ian, pettily mean in his frustration. “Mel is—she’s free,” he said, voice breaking. The relief came back, sickly-sweet. “She’s alone. She’s herself again.”

I stared down at the crytank in our hands.

In… my hands.

“Give her some time, Christ,” Ian said, fed up. He kicked the door for good measure. “You’re waking up the whole damn caves, and it’ll only turn into a bigger mess. Let them—let her sleep, alright? Come back in the morning and see if she will want to see your face.”

“ _Fuck you_ , O’Shea. I wasn’t talking to you.”

“Then go on not talking to me somewhere else.”

There was a pause. “I’ll come back in the morning, Mel,” Jared said quietly, and then there was silence.

Ian turned to look at me, though I didn’t look up a him. A second passed.

“Melanie?” Doc’s voice was small, but startled me and Ian, who jumped and whirled back to the door. “I’m sorry. Please, can you just tell me if she’s fine? If the color on the cryotank—”

“Everything’s fine,” she told him, strained. “She’s fine.”

“Oh,” Doc breathed out. “Okay. I’ll… be in the hospital. If you need me. And you, are you—”

“I’m fine,” I said through gritted teeth.

“Alright,” Doc said softly. “…good night.”

His steps echoed in the caves. Ian and I waited until we couldn’t hear them anymore, then breathed in deeply, relieved. I felt like I was finally out of danger, even though logically I knew no danger had actually been present, but—

“He had a knife,” I said faintly. “Jared had a knife. I guess he was trying to force Doc to give Wanderer to him. So he could put her in a cryotank. It makes sense. But he still had a knife. And Doc was holding her…”

Ian winced, kneeling by us again. “You two are never going to be okay inside that hospital, are you?”

“No,” I said, laughing without humor. “No, we never will.”

My own words made us pause. I swallowed nothing, looking down at the cryotank in my arms. It was… small. Smaller than it should be, I felt, even though it was big like a crate, because it held all of Wanderer inside of it. It hadn’t been horrifying with any of the other souls, but I was feeling the horror of it right now: of Wanderer inside this box, the little blue color on its lid the only indication I had that she wasn’t _dying_ in this planet her body wasn’t made to survive.

“But you made it out, and you’re both okay,” Ian said, expression twisting again. “And she… Christ. What’s the plan? She didn’t want another body…”

I flinched at the thought. I didn’t want her in another body. I didn’t want her anywhere else.

But she had insisted. She had saved me, and I had saved her, and we were both okay, and that didn’t change the fact that we were now apart.

“She’ll have to deal with it,” I said through gritted teeth. I should stop doing that, the last thing we needed here was to have to worry about fucking dentistry. “We’ll find something. We’ll find a way. I’m not sending her off to the Dolphins or something like that. She belongs _here._ ”

Ian paused. His eyes were very dark in the night. His hair was wild, his posture drooping; it was obvious I had woken him up not very gently. It made him look… soft.

“Mel, are you okay?” he asked, unsure. He looked like he had after Kyle had tried to kill us, when he hadn’t known which one of us was talking and couldn’t understand what we were saying.

_I’m fine_ , I tried to say, but what my very own traitorous fucking mouth said instead was:

“I’m so _alone._ ”

I clamped my mouth shut after saying it, but it didn’t change the fact that I had _said it_ , and now it was said it was _true_ , and I burst into tears. I put a hand on top of my face but that didn’t do anything, and I couldn’t spare my other hand because I _wouldn’t_ let go of her. Tears slid down my cheeks and blurred my vision, and my expression twisted.

“She’s gone,” I said, because I just couldn’t stop making shit worse, could I? “She left me alone. I can’t _find her_ , she’s not _anywhere_. It’s like—it’s like—”

There was nothing like it. I couldn’t find the words.

(It was like reaching out with a hand, so safe and sure in the knowledge that it would be held by another that you didn’t even turn to look at the other person—but no touch came, and when you looked, horrified, there was no one there.)

Ian put a hand hesitantly on our—my—shoulder, then drew me to his side. I leaned against him gratefully, hiding my stupid face against his shoulder. The corner of the cryotank was now digging painfully into _both_ our sides, and we were both too pathetically glad for that to complain about it or shift positions.

“But you’ll both be okay now, right?” he asked quietly. “You won’t disappear.”

I was myself again. The body was me again. Wanderer had done it—she had made me whole.

She had cut out half of my heart.

“I won’t,” I swore, latching onto his shirt until my fingers hurt with it. “I won’t let _her_ do it either. I swear to God, Ian, the things this woman’s done to my blood pressure.”

He laughed wetly, confused, and patted what he could of the cryotank as if to make sure it was really there.


End file.
